Died on January 27

98

Nerva
Roman Emperor from 96 to 98.
Nerva became Emperor at the age of sixty-five, after a lifetime of imperial service under Nero and the rulers of the Flavian dynasty. Under Nero, he was a member of the imperial entourage and played a vital part in exposing the Pisonian conspiracy of 65. Later, as a loyalist to the Flavians, he attained consulships in 71 and 90 during the reigns of Vespasian and Domitian respectively

457

Marcian
Byzantine Emperor from 450 to 457.
Marcian's rule marked a recovery of the Eastern Empire, which the Emperor protected from external menaces and reformed economically and financially. On the other side, the isolationistic policies of Marcian left the Western Roman Empire without help against barbarian attacks, which materialized in the Italian campaigns of Attila and in the Vandal sack of Rome. The Eastern Orthodox Church recognizes Marcian as a saint for his role in convoking the Council of Chalcedon

672

Pope Vitalian
reigned from 30 July 657 to his death in 672.
He was born in Segni, Lazio, the son of Anastasius

1062

Adelaide of Hungary
the only daughter of King Andrew I of Hungary of the Árpád dynasty and Anastasia of Kiev.
She was the second wife of Vratislav II of Bohemia, whom she married in 1058. She was a good dynastic match for Vratislav, as he profited from the alliance with her father. They had four children, including Bretislaus II of Bohemia and Judith of Bohemia. Vratislav became duke in 1061 after death of his brother, thus Adelaide was duchess for only a short time before her death early in 1062

1142

Yue Fei
a military general who lived in the Southern Song dynasty.
His ancestral home was in Xiaoti, Yonghe Village, Tangyin, Xiangzhou, Henan. He is best known for leading Southern Song forces in the wars in the 12th century between Southern Song and the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty in northern China before being put to death by the Southern Song government in 1142. He was granted the posthumous name Wumu by Emperor Xiaozong in 1169, and later granted the posthumous title King of È by Emperor Ningzong in 1211. Widely seen as a patriot and national folk hero in China, since after his death, Yue Fei has evolved into a standard epitome of loyalty in Chinese culture

1311

Külüg Khan Emperor Wuzong of Yuan
regarded as the seventh Great Khan of the Mongols in Mongolia.
His name means "warrior Khan or fine horse Khan" in the Mongolian language

1377

Frederick the Simple
King of Sicily from 1355 to 1377.
He was the second son of Peter II of Sicily and Elisabeth of Carinthia. He succeeded his brother Louis. The documents of his era call him the "infante Frederick, ruler of the kingdom of Sicily", without any regnal number

1490

Ashikaga Yoshimasa
the 8th shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate who reigned from 1449 to 1473 during the Muromachi period of Japan.
Yoshimasa was the son of the sixth shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori

1540

Angela Merici
an Italian religious leader and saint.
She founded the Order of Ursulines in 1535 in Brescia

1547

Anne of Bohemia and Hungary
sometimes known as Anna Jagellonica, Queen of the Romans , Bohemia and Hungary as the wife of King Ferdinand I, later Holy Roman Emperor.

1556

Humayun
now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of northern India from 1531–1540 and again from 1555–1556.
Like his father, Babur, he lost his kingdom early, but regained it with Persian aid, with additional territory. At the time of his death in 1556, the Mughal empire spanned almost one million square kilometers

1592

Gian Paolo Lomazzo
an Italian painter, best remembered for his writings on art theory, belonging to the second generation that produced Mannerism in Italian art and architecture.

1596

Francis Drake
an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era.
Drake carried out the second circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580

1597

Jaakko Ilkka
a Finnish yeoman and trader.
He is remembered for leading the Cudgel War of 1596; at its end, and the peasants' defeat on January 1–2, 1597, he escaped, but was soon recaptured and executed for his part in the fighting

1613

Anna of Saxony (1567–1613)
a German noblewoman member of the House of Wettin and by marriage Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Eisenach.

1629

Hieronymus Praetorius
a north German composer and organist of the late Renaissance and very early Baroque eras.
He was not related to the much more famous Michael Praetorius, though the Praetorius family had many distinguished musicians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries

1631

Xenia Shestova
a spouse of Fyodor Romanov and the mother of Mikhail Romanov.
The origin of Xeniya Ivanovna has been disputed by genealogists for centuries. It is currently accepted that her surname was Shestova and that her grandfather was Timofey Gryaznoy, a rich landowner from Uglich

1638

Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses
a Spanish novelist.

1641

Marcin Wadowita
a Polish priest, theologian, professor and chancellor of the Jagiellonian University.

1645

Takuan Sōhō
a major figure in the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism.

1651

Abraham Bloemaert
a Dutch painter and printmaker in etching and engraving.
He was one of the "Haarlem Mannerists" from about 1585, but in the new century altered his style to fit new Baroque trends. He mostly painted history subjects and some landscapes

1664

Archduke Charles Joseph of Austria
an Archduke of Austria and Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.
He was also the bishop of Olmütz, and Breslau, Passau

1688

Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang
a concubine of the Qing Dynasty ruler Hong Taiji.
She was declared his spouse officially although she was not his first wife, becoming empress in 1636. Her life after becoming the empress dowager is more well known historically. She was the mother of Hong Taiji's successor, the Shunzhi Emperor, and grandmother of Shunzhi's successor, Kangxi Emperor. She wielded significant influence in the Qing imperial court during the reign of her son and especially, during that of her grandson. Known for her wisdom and political insight, Empress Xiaozhuangwen is a respected figure in the history of the Qing Dynasty

1689

Robert Aske (merchant)
a merchant in the City of London.
He is remembered primarily for the charitable foundation created from his estate, which nowadays operates two schools in Hertfordshire, Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, and others elsewhere

1711

Antoine de Pas de Feuquières
a French soldier.
He was the son of diplomat Isaac de Feuquières

1731

Bartolomeo Cristofori
an Italian maker of musical instruments, generally regarded as the inventor of the piano.

1733

Thomas Woolston
an English theologian.
Although he was often classed as a deist, his biographer William Trapnell regards him as an Anglican who held unorthodox theological views

1740

Louis Henri Duke of Bourbon
head of the Bourbon-Condé cadet branch of the France's reigning House of Bourbon from 1710 to his death, and served as prime minister to his kinsman Louis XV from 1723 to 1726.

1749

Nicolas-Henri Tardieu
a prominent French engraver, known for his sensitive reproductions of Antoine Watteau's paintings.
He was appointed graveur du roi to King Louis XV of France. His second wife, Marie-Anne Horthemels, came from a family that included engravers and painters. She is known as an engraver in her own right. Nicolas-Henri and Marie-Anne Tardieu had many descendants who were noted artists, most of them engravers

1763

Anton Ulrich Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
Duke of Saxe-Meiningen from 1746 to 1763.

1777

Hubert de Brienne
a French naval commander.

1782

Leopoldine Marie of Anhalt-Dessau
the ninth child of Prince Leopold I of Anhalt-Dessau and his wife, Anna Louise Föhse.
She married on 13 February 1739 the last margrave Frederick Henry of Brandenburg-Schwedt. After 1788, her Schwedt Castle was used by the Prussian royal family as a summer residence

1794

Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille
a French noble and royalist notable for his military involvement against the French Revolution.

1802

Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg
a German composer and conductor.

1807

Ivan Rakhmaninov
a Russian publisher, translator and educator.

1807

Osman Pazvantoğlu
an Ottoman soldier, a governor of the Vidin district after 1794, and a rebel against Ottoman rule.
He is also remembered as the friend of Rigas Feraios, a Greek revolutionary poet, whom he tried to rescue from the Ottoman authorities in Belgrade

1812

John Perkins (Royal Navy officer)
a British Royal Navy officer.
Perkins was the first black commissioned officer in the Royal Navy. He rose from obscurity to be one of the most successful ship captains of the Georgian navy. He captained a 10-gun schooner during the American War of Independence and in a two-year period captured at least 315 enemy ships

1814

Johann Gottlieb Fichte
a German philosopher.
He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and those of the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy and is considered one of the fathers of German nationalism

1816

Samuel Hood 1st Viscount Hood
a British admiral known particularly for his service in the American Revolutionary War and French Revolutionary Wars.
He acted as a mentor to Horatio Nelson

1829

Jean-Baptiste Le Carpentier
a French political activist from Normandy.

1829

Luigi Fortis
Very Rev.
Luigi Fortis, S.J. was an Italian Jesuit elected 20th Superior-General of the Society of Jesus

1836

Princess Wilhelmine of Baden
Grand Duchess consort of Hesse and the Rhine.

1844

Princess Cecilia of Sweden (1807–1844)
a composer, a Swedish princess by birth, and Grand Duchess of Oldenburg by marriage.
She was the daughter of King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden and Frederica of Baden

1844

Charles Nodier
often underestimated by literary historians.

1850

Johann Gottfried Schadow
a German sculptor.

1851

John James Audubon
an American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter.
He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book entitled The Birds of America , is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon identified 25 new species

1854

George Stanley Faber
an Anglican theologian and prolific author.

1857

Dorothea Lieven
a Baltic German noblewoman and wife of Prince Khristofor Andreyevich Lieven, Russian ambassador to London, 1812 to 1834.
She was also an influential figure among many of the diplomatic, political, and social circles of 19th-century Europe

1860

János Bolyai
a Hungarian mathematician, one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry — a geometry that differs from Euclidean geometry in its definition of parallel lines.
The discovery of a consistent alternative geometry that might correspond to the structure of the universe helped to free mathematicians to study abstract concepts irrespective of any possible connection with the physical world

1860

Thomas Brisbane
Governor of New South Wales , as recommended by the Duke of Wellington, with whom he had seen military service.